Moominland Midwinter
core novel 1957 The Moomins
Record
| Original title | Trollvinter |
|---|---|
| First published | 1957 |
| Original language |  SV |
| First English translation | 1958 |
| Translator | Thomas Warburton |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.40 (18,560 ratings, collected 2026-10-06) |
| Page count | 176 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780312625412 |
| Internal chronology | 6 |
Synopsis
Moomins hibernate from November to April, but one winter Moomintroll wakes up and cannot get back to sleep. Alone in a sleeping house, he steps out into a world he has never seen, white, silent and strange, where the sun does not rise and the familiar valley is unrecognisable. Little My, who has also woken, takes it all in her stride; Too-ticky, who lives in the bathing-house, explains what she can of the winter and its creatures, the Dweller Under the Sink, the invisible shrews, the Lady of the Cold who freezes anyone who looks her in the face, and the Groke, drawn to the warmth of fire. Through the dark months Moomintroll learns to ski, mourns his old garden, grieves a death and finally sees the sun return, having become, as Too-ticky says, a Moomin who has lived through winter.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Moomins
- Series: The Moomins core; position 6 of 9 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Tove Jansson
Notes
- From the series record (The Moomins): Tove Jansson's nine Moomin books (1945-1970), written in Swedish in Finland and illustrated by the author: the Moomin family of Moominvalley and their friends, from the comet, the Hobgoblin's hat and the flooded theatre of the early comedies to the winter, the sea and the empty house of the darker late novels.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Moomins: position 6 of 9: previous Moominsummer Madness (1954) · next Tales from Moominvalley (1962)
Sources
← The Moomins dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.